The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal

Deborah Gorham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136248108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

In Victorian England, the perception of girlhood arose not in isolation, but as one manifestation of the prevailing conception of femininity. Examining the assumptions that underlay the education and upbringing of middle-class girls, this book is also a study of the learning of gender roles in theory and reality. It was originally published in 1982.

The first two sections examine the image of women in the Victorian family, and the advice offered in printed sources on the rearing of daughters during the Victorian period. To illustrate the effect and evolution of feminine ideals over the Victorian period, the book's final section presents the actual experiences of several middle-class Victorian women who represent three generations and range, socioeconomically, from lower-middle class through upper-middle class.

Part One

Chapter 1 Women and Girls in the Middle-Class Family: Images and Reality

DOI: 10.4324/9780203104095-1

If the triumph of industrial capitalism brought about the making of the English working class, it also produced a new middle class, a middle class with a self-conscious identity and a sense of its destiny as the most fitting architect of a new society. The middle class that emerged as a result of industrial capitalism was predominantly urban in character, its male members being engaged in entrepreneurial, managerial and professional occupations. At the highest levels of the class were men engaged in substantial business enterprises, in the liberal professions and in public administration. Its lowest levels included a greatly increased number of clerks, and those employed in the minor retail trades.¹

A shared set of ideas and beliefs united this diverse group. Of first importance was a belief in the positive value of social mobility. That a man could rise in the world through effort, talent and initiative, and that such a rise in social status was to be commended was the fundamental principle of Victorian middle-class ideology. Fuelling that principle was the gospel of work. As Samuel Smiles put it: ‘National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness and vice.’² Smiles expressed a generally accepted belief held by middle-class people that it was they rather than aristocrats or the labouring poor who would most surely possess such industry, energy and uprightness. The virtues of thrift, order, punctuality, all buttressed by evangelical Protestantism, were offered by the self-confident voice of the Victorian middle class as the prescription for individual and collective well-being.

Smilesian self-confidence was not, however, the only feature of the Victorian middle-class outlook. Doubt and anxiety were also part of the ethos of the period. The rapidity with which social and economic change was taking place was both a source of pride and a source of tension. A sense of anxiety is such a pervasive element in Victorian discourse that one historian has seen it as the most important feature of the Victorian ‘frame of mind’.³

One Victorian response to that tension was to define certain institutions in ways that would allay doubt and anxiety. Having produced industrial capitalism, the Victorians sought refuge from it. For the Victorian middle class, the most important of such refuges was the family. A cult of domesticity, an idealised vision of home and family, a vision that perceived the family as both enfolding its members and excluding the outside world, is a major recurring image in Victorian literature, art and social commentary.⁴

The cult of domesticity helped to relieve the tensions that existed between the moral values of Christianity, with its emphasis on love and charity, and the values of capitalism, which asserted that the world of commerce should be pervaded by a spirit of competition and a recognition that only the fittest should survive. By locating Christian values in the home, and capitalist values in the public world of commerce, the Victorians were able to achieve an efficient moral balance. The home became a shelter for religious values, in their widest context including the values associated with personal relationships; the world of commerce could thereby be absolved from the necessity of acting on Christian principles. Moreover its moral barrenness became bearable, because the idealisation of the home meant that, at least in theory, some refuge from the harsh public world was possible.

The creation of a sharp division between the private world of home and the public world of commerce, professional life and politics, had a profound impact on the way in which women were perceived in the Victorian period. Throughout the period, it was customary to refer to public and private life as two ‘separate spheres’. Each of the two spheres was thought to be inextricably connected either with women or with men. The public sphere of business, politics and professional life was defined as the male sphere. The private sphere of love, the emotions and domesticity was defined as the sphere of women. The public sphere was the male's exclusive domain, whereas the private sphere was seen as presided over by females for the express purpose of providing a place of renewal for men, after their rigorous activities in the harsh, competitive public sphere.

The cult of domesticity assigned to women both a separate sphere and a distinct set of roles. Victorian conceptions of the idealised role of women are epitomised by Coventry Patmore's poem The Angel in the House, the title of which captures its essence.⁵ The ideal woman was willing to be dependent on men and submissive to them, and she would have a preference for a life restricted to the confines of home. She would be innocent, pure, gentle and self-sacrificing. Possessing no ambitious strivings, she would be free of any trace of anger or hostility. More emotional than man, she was also more capable of self-renunciation.

The characteristics of the ideal Victorian woman can be summed up in one word: she was feminine. Femininity is a psychological concept, in that it implies a distinctive model for female personality. It is a modern idea and represents a major ideological shift in the justification for the secondary position of females. While female subordination has been a traditional element of Western European civilisation, pre-modern methods of enforcing it had relied largely on brute force or on an appeal to biblical injunction. But since the end of the eighteenth century, the concept of femininity, which is based on a conception of human psychology that assumes that feminine qualities are ‘natural’, has been the major ideological agent in enforcing the subordination of women.⁶ Intimations of the concept are, to be sure, found earlier, but it is only at the end of the eighteenth century that a self-consciously constructed theory about psychological differences between males and females began to be developed. In the Victorian period, the era of the ‘Angel in the House’, the idea of femininity came to full flower.

Much Victorian idealisation of femininity was concerned with its manifestation by adult women in their roles as wives and mothers. The idealised Victorian home, however, did not consist of husband and wife alone, but of husband, wife and children, and just as the parental role was suffused with intense emotional significance, so also was the role of children. Both male and female children were of importance in idealisations of family life, but daughters had a special significance. Sons would help to determine the middle-class family's place in the world, but daughters could offer the family a particular sort of tenderness and spirituality. As a writer for a late nineteenth-century women's magazine stated:

Surely there is no thought sweeter or more tender than that which comes with a baby-girl . . . The thought of a man-child has more possibilities of strength and power. It gratifies pride and ambition more . . . But the mother of the little woman-child sees in her the born queen, and, at the same time, the servant of home; the daughter who is to lift the burden of domestic cares and make them unspeakably lighter by taking her share of them; the sister who is to be a little mother to her brothers and sisters; the future wife and mother in her turn, she is the owner of a destiny which may call on her to endure much and to suffer much, but which, as it also bids her love much ... is well worthy of an immortal creature ... A family without a girl . . . lacks a crowning grace, quite as much as a family without a boy misses a tower of strength.⁷

That passage was written in 1887, but similar portrayals of the daughters began to appear by the end of the eighteenth century in advice literature, in fiction, in poetry and in art. This persistence is remarkable in view of the extent to which the actual lives of middle-class girls changed over the course of the nineteenth century. The strength of the imagery and its persistence would seem to indicate that an idealised view of the daughter's role is a crucial feature of the cult of domesticity.

The idealised view of the daughter may have been so powerful because certain features of the idealised view of womanhood could, in fact, more appropriately be applied to daughters than to wives. One of the ambiguities involved in the Victorian idealisation of womanhood is that while the ideal woman was to have womanly strength, she was also to remain permanently childlike, childlike even in maturity:

The perfect loveliness of a woman's countenance can only consist in that majestic peace, which is found in the memory of happy and useful years . . . and from the joining of this with that yet more majestic childishness, which is still full of change and promise . . . There is no old age where there is still that promise — it is eternal youth.⁸

The ‘majestic childishness’ of the ideal woman was a sign of the extent to which she was removed from the vicissitudes of the public sphere. It was seen as necessary that a woman retain a childlike simplicity precisely because it was felt that her life ought to be restricted to the domestic sphere, and her domestic calling was seen as both the cause and the effect of the need to shelter her from the rigours of the public sphere. The Victorians frequently spoke of the way in which males were ‘hardened’ by their exposure to the rough and tumble of the outside world, but they also believed that, should a woman be so exposed, she too would be hardened. Thus, women were told that they must remain within the domestic sphere both because their duties were to be performed there, and because contact with the wider world would damage their ability to perform those duties.

The idea of the adult woman who possesses ‘majestic childishness’ reflects the contradictions that existed at the centre of the idealised vision of true womanhood. How convincing could an idealisation be that combined both childlike simplicity with the complex duties of wifehood and motherhood? Even at an overt, explicitly stated level, contradictions existed in the imagery of true womanhood, and beneath the surface, expressed through allusion, were the tensions inherent in the Victorian view of female sexuality. The ideal of feminine purity is implicitly asexual; how, then, could it be reconciled with the active sexuality that would inevitably be included in the duties of wife and mother?⁹

These contradictions could be resolved by focusing on the femininity of the daughter rather than on the adult woman. Much more successfully than her mother, a young girl could represent the quintessential angel in the house. Unlike an adult woman, a girl could be perceived as a wholly unambiguous model of feminine dependence, childlike simplicity and sexual purity. While it might be believed that an adult woman should retain a childlike simplicity, clearly a real child could be conceived of as more childlike than could an adult woman.

The qualities of the Angel in the House, whether she be wife or daughter, were defined as spiritual in nature. For this reason, they took on a universal application, transcending mere material circumstances. The ideal Angel in the House would be able to create a true home wherever she found herself:

Wherever a true wife comes . . . home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless. ¹⁰

In the spiritual realm, then, the true wife could create the desired atmosphere of Victorian domesticity out of thin air. However, middle-class Victorian beliefs about domesticity functioned on levels other than the spiritual. There were, as well, generally accepted standards for the cultural environment of the ideal family, and just as the spiritual well-being of the home was considered a feminine responsibility, so also was the creation of suitable standards of taste and manners.

In its manners and style, the successful middle-class family would, above all else, manifest the quality of gentility. The concept of gentility was a legacy of the social structure that had characterised the eighteenth century. Its continued importance in the Victorian period attests to the fact that the middle-class endorsement of social mobility had not been entirely triumphant. The belief that social status could be earned through effort was continually being challenged by the older belief that a particular social status was inseparable from one's rank at birth. This belief was frequently expressed as hostility towards those who had achieved, or who were attempting to achieve, upward mobility. Gentility was not a clearly definable quality but revealed itself in nuances that clearly distinguished members of the established and dominant classes from those who still bore traces of their upwardly mobile progress. Throughout the nineteenth century, whether one was gentle or vulgar continued to be a hallmark of social status.

Two systems of assigning status, then, existed in the Victorian period, one based on material wealth, and one based on the manifestation of certain personal and cultural attributes. One way in which the conflict between these two systems was managed, if not resolved, was through the family's function as an indicator of status. The family's style of life displayed its tastes and thus its status and its gentility. A man could achieve success through ha...